Able looks promising: Higher information density than Medium, syntax highlighting in code blocks, no big-ass modal interrupting when I just want to read a silly blog post.
Besides, Medium in its current state is one of the most annoying sites and I don't get why it enjoys such a strong SERP ranking. I mean blog posts are a commodity and Medium thinks they are Netflix showing the latest Disney property.
If Google search devs read this: Demote all Medium results.
1. If you use Google signed in, they know (I assume) you preference technical material (which is the bucket Medium falls in)
2. On-site links; one of the most powerful (and underutilized methods of SEO) is interlinking pages on a site. I'm not sure why this is the case, but it can be a determining factor in top-ranked sites (see Wikipedia as the canonical example of onsite linking).
3. Inbound links; lots of people link to Medium content. If Medium uses Google's tracking tools, Google has a good idea of the inbound traffic and can adjust based on the site's popularity.
None of this has to do with user experience. Unfortunately.
I'm sure there is more (like page load times, how information is organized in the HTML, etc.) that factors in, but these are the ones that occurred to me.
Apologies for the attack, couldn’t resist. However, what you wrote is common sense and you should assume that anyone lurking around on HN knows that stuff. I mean you actually described the page rank algorithm which was the foundation of Google but there are many more signals nowadays. So your post felt like a (small) attack too.
FYI, Google runs quite a large spam team which flags scammy sites manually. Sites with such a modal are usually rather on the spammy side of life and gets flagged by the team. If you get too many flags you get severe penalties slowly eating your traffic in a way that it’s not clearly obvious and it can take years to recover.
But since it’s Medium such UI seems to be tolerated.
If I ran that team I would have killed Medium's, Quora's and Pinterest's search traffic. And soon maybe StackOverflows as well.
Certainly not my intent. I come across stuff like GGP and I have a gut reaction "Oh! I know a thing! Here, see what I know?! I am helpful!"
I do this occasionally at work, too: where I explain something fundamental to people who have been doing the work for 20+ years.
Part of it is that I'm reinforcing my mental model, and part is I'm trying to be helpful. I suppose this can come across as patronizing or insulting. That's never my intent. I try not to assume what people do or don't know, because I don't know quite a lot and the asides that people make are super helpful to me (especially in fields that I know nothing about).
I can deploy a Docker-based node backend with basic functionality from my phone's ssh client in five minutes.
Give me a bit more time, a keyboard and I could build you any API endpoint, http server, glue code between DB or even low level proxy server functionalities.
No offense but isn't the 'problem' backend solved years ago?
I am an iPhone user who refuses to upgrade from my 7+ until this silly notch business is removed. It does not "disappear completely and immediately", especially when viewing landscape mode video content.
Sorry, I was not specific enough. It's a "silly notch" to people who don't use an iPhone with the notch. If you never upgrade, it will remain a silly notch to you forever, while those who do upgrade find that it disappears completely and immediately, as I said.
If you want to watch landscape video, a double tap switches between notched and non-notched views, so you can choose if you care. Most people don't after day one.
I do not own a phone with a notch, but I’m under the impression that most video content is not wide enough for the notch to cut into the video.
I think you have the option of zooming in a bit to remove black bars on edges; with the drawback that corner pixels and the notch area are lost. Same as any other non-16:9 phone
I always thought I'd be bothered by a notch, but when my old phone eventually gave up the ghost I saw a great deal for a Huawei phone with a notch, and I immediately got used to the design. I expected to need at least a few days to acclimatize myself, but it was instant, weirdly enough. Now Now it never even enters my mind until I hear someone talking, or see comments, about notches in phones.
In this context: Does anyone have experiences with Tandem, especially this feature where you can see what your peers are doing (showing the app name of your focused window, I think)?
No experience with it, but I struggle to imagine it being useful where the viewed person is a programmer. A day is split between, what, a browser and a terminal emulator? And an IDE if used?
I agree but this might be already useful. The biggest challenge for most when they work from home is lacking social pressure leading to procrastination. When I read about Tandem's take on this, I thought that’s a smart, subtle solution. You could still game the system by just using your phone but still: Any cheating results in odd behavior on Tandem and probably to more discipline. Maybe I am wrong but I need just people who tried Tandem and share their experiences.
The real usefulness that I’ve found has been in having a pointer during screen share, and being able to more fluidly hop in an out of voice calls (think discord).
No need to get grumpy. The wording I've used is just a bit more polite than pointing my finger on the one and only maintainer, you, telling his tonality is totally off and might scare people away.
All good and sorry, maybe my initial comment was still offending.
However and what I meant is that your writing style, also looking in the comments here, is for my taste a bit too fluffy, elaborative, zealous and making it hard for the reader to grasp the essence of your statements quickly. If you can’t win people with words your lib won’t have the chance get tried.
While I like new takes in frontend, the overall wording was the reason not to read more about Connective but rather leave a snarky comment.
> All good and sorry, maybe my initial comment was still offending.
No seriously I did not find it offensive even one bit.
> While I like new takes in frontend, the overall wording was the reason not to read more about Connective but rather leave a snarky comment.
And I'm sorry to hear that. I am aware of this and do consciously try to keep it as simple and straight-forward as possible, though there is always room for improvement. It would be really helpful if you could perhaps elaborate a bit more on this, so I would know better on how and what to fix.
Guess I am the only one but I heavily depend on my smartphone's ssh client and a fast and close VPS. I use it all the time and a phone's keyboard is actually the perfect interface for console apps like vim.
Anyone who makes serious money with his notebook moved away from Apple years ago. I can't take people serious buying Macbooks in 2019 posting a rant about, oh surprise, the broken keyboard. This is a well known fact and if you don't develop for iOS there is no single reason or lock-in forcing you to use Macs.
While I think that TS offers probably the best type system out ther, eg way better than Go's, I'd love to see a more balanced view on TS in discussion threads like this one.
TS is a must for long-term code which should be maintainable in several years by teams. Any lead engineer with responsibility for some crucial app and dev team not using TS is doing something wrong. But using TS comes at a cost. Even when you are savvy in TS you won't bang out code like with pure JS.
But especially in prototyping phases you need this fast-paced coding. And using TS or any type system slows you down, even when you are familiar with typed languages. Often your final code faced many iterations and I sometimes like to introduce TS later, usually at a point where I just need types but not always and as default from the first key press. In early stages I still try to test ideas, algorithms and their general feasibility and a fast 'mind-to-code' interface is crucial and types would stay in the way then.
Further, finding the right type can take some time, just google what type a React's children prop should be and find long discussions. Welcome to the TS-what-type-is-actually-xy-rabbit-hole. And declaring everything as any shouldn't be the answer.
A big drawback are also TS error messages which are super hard to grasp. You get there and you even find tutorials just for understanding TS error messages but it's unecessarily infuriating.
Moreover, VSCode, its TS language server are amazing pieces of tech but here you face also strange behaviours. Types get full Intellisense support while interfaces don't which doesn't make sense. So you need still to go the definition yourself and it's not that IDE-like feeling you hoped for or people told you.
In my setups, I use TS instead of Babel but use both JS and TS files in one code base depending on the requirements and situation.
So, my message is, yes TS is great, has probably the best type system but the tonality by its community/users needs to be much more balanced and less fanboy-ish. I just can't take devs serious who praise TS to death. This is just not true. More, maintainable code is also not just created by a type system but also sane architectures (eg React) and many other factors. Types won't make bad code maintainable. So, types have their place but not everything in TS-land is shiny.
I wouldn't exactly call what TypeScript has the best type system out there. It's deliberately unsound, doesn't enforce full static type-checking, _and_ doesn't provide for runtime checks (there are third-party libraries, but if you're bringing up third parties one might as well argue that JavaScript has a great type system because TypeScript exists).
A lot of it is due to the project's overwhelming priority being as easy to interop with JS as possible, but I've found that quite a few of TypeScript's fancier features are sugar that's entirely up to the developer to enforce.
Disagree. TS' type system is fully featured compared to others and what you described as an disadvantage is actually an advantage or TS' killer feature: you can gradually convert a dynamic code base into a static one where needed. IDK of any other language that allows this.
Fully featured compared to what, exactly? If you say Java I might just have to laugh.
Obviously the compatibility with JS is TypeScript's "killer feature", but it's a killer feature that has very explicit costs you're ignoring for some reason. You cannot have a truly excellent type system while trying to maintain the level of compatibility with a dynamic, weakly typed language that TypeScript does, something that the language team acknowledges themselves[0]. I don't quite see how one can call a deliberately unsound type system "the best".
For prototyping using React and TS sounds like a bad idea, because React is not that well supported by the TS community.
Whereas if you were to use Angular there the types help you.
Or, if you do something in Android with Kotlin, the types are very helpful. Quick auto complete and instant sanity checking of the code.
No oops cannot call method on undefined. I found that was what took a lot of time for me when I used plain JS.
Furthermore using mixed codebases make things really slow, because then either you need to disable strict mode, or you need to provide typings for at the interface of the TS JS files.
Again, this is probably very much path dependent. If you use a lot of strongly typed things for years, then you'll be fast in that. Just two days ago a colleague helped me with some Scala, and we ended up with a few lines of EitherT monad transformers that helped type some code involving Future and HttpResult types. I felt the exact same "figuring out the types takes too long" on my own, so I initially went with less functional Scala.
So the same/similar problems (like typing React and Redux) exists in other languages as well, and for some folks it's nothing, because they are very accustomed to that kind of thinking.
> For prototyping using React and TS sounds like a bad idea, because React is not that well supported by the TS community.
Not really true and guess you misunderstood me and are not on the latest state of things. You can perfectly use the TS compiler as the compiler for your JSX code. Then you can decide case by case when to use TSX or not. and many major libs (mobx, formik) are written in TS and perfectly support TS.
I'd disagree with you statement that long usage of a typed language makes you faster. It is about choosing the right tools and static typing ist not always the right answer. But this is exactly what annoys me: the urge to evangilize everyone with static typing.
Besides, Medium in its current state is one of the most annoying sites and I don't get why it enjoys such a strong SERP ranking. I mean blog posts are a commodity and Medium thinks they are Netflix showing the latest Disney property.
If Google search devs read this: Demote all Medium results.